There isn’t much romantic love, just the romanticization of young lust and teen angst. Those are part of the same continuum, though and when II taps into its eternal power, the cries from Milner’s bedroom nothing short of universal.

For the first time in Atmosphere's long career, the stakes feel low, and Southsiders feels both pleasant and noncommittal, like it isn't even convinced of its own right to exist.

The works are raw and technically poor, but the bitterness and hatred they express is overwhelming, illustrating how base feeling, when expressed with such belief, can overcome any window dressing put up around it.

In the Hollows never feels lived-in, or more generously, part of the reality Baldwin has found and written into these songs. The exception comes with the title cut, the record’s biggest production and the most anomalous and audacious pop anthem of Baldwin’s career.

Sheezus has a few good points and some admirable intentions, but too often it misses the point.

The record is an easy, pleasant listen, but it's not particularly compelling as a whole, occasionally falling into a pattern of contented stuffiness.

The immaculate emptiness is, in a sense, Asiatisch’s masterstroke, helping bolster the pervading sense of dislocation of being exposed to a society that’s been fed through the photocopier one too many times.

Their refusal to let the record resolve itself into something that can be easily sorted or explained makes it easy to play it on repeat, trying to find a new angle to approach it from.

Her mesmerizing, eventful, and strange album brings these remote voices close enough to feel their breath in our ears.

The album finally makes good on the post-punk and metal influences that have forever lingered at the edges of Wovenhand’s output.

Nothing here bears the strain of overzealous ambition, there are no flubbed notes, unseemly textures, unfortunate lyrical ideas; everything positive or negative about Breathing Statues is simply too ephemeral to make a fuss about.

As with Skying, it’s a high compliment to say Luminous is a giant bowl of assorted, premium ear candy, and it’s about as nourishing, which maybe is the point.

Gone is the chipper ukulele of w h o k i l l and BiRd-BrAiNs; Nikki Nack signifies maturity while still allowing room for Garbus to do zany things.

Artificial Sweeteners certainly isn't a terrible album, and it does the trick if you're just looking for a quick pick-me-up, but it leaves a bland aftertaste.

We’re used to breakup albums that assume you just want to crawl into a hole and die, but I Never Learn is for the times when heartbreak is so life-affirming that you want to share the feeling with the world.

Someday World is well arranged, meticulously produced, even catchy at times. But there’s an overriding sense of aimlessness, of people just dropping by the studio and breezing into the songs before wafting off to a more important appointment.

For an album recorded primitively inside a Nashville box, there are some stunning performances on A Letter Home.... Occasionally, though, the recording quality distracts from the album's content.

Chad VanGaalen's world is weird, but never just for weird's sake--his creations spring from deep inside the singular, twisted mind of their creator, and Shrink Dust is the closest we've come yet to getting inside his head.

The album is an interesting, almost peculiarly personal mix of sounds, one that almost seems underdeveloped and unlikely to win Polachek any new fans. As an outlet for Polachek’s songwriting, though, it suggests there's more interesting work yet to come from her.

Noise interference is ramped up, as are counterintuitive rhythms and ugly chords, only to tie them all together into an unexpected sort of cohesion.

Ultimately, Chasmata is slightly inferior to its predecessor due to a sequencing issue near the record's end.

Get Back still finds McBean trying to tap into something risky and surprising, even if the results are the sometimes-egregious misstep of a mid-40s rock musician obsessed with the letdown of aging.

It's to Kelis' boundless credit that she can make the twee screw of “Floyd” or the passive attack trip-hop of “Runnin” feel warmly human just by doing her best to overpower it--even as the music tries, and nearly succeeds, in overpowering her.

The relative warmth and light here gives the music a nostalgic cast, which was at the heart of what made Endless Summer so memorable, but Bécs also possesses an added layer that doesn’t necessarily work in its favor. Fennesz once illuminated the beauty of a digitally scrambled memory, but Bécs is a memory of a digitally scrambled memory.

More so than any identifiable influence, More Than Any Other Day is ultimately defined by its unsettled, restless spirit; this is an album that treats panic attacks and adrenalized ecstasy as two sides of the same pounding heart, with its simultaneous transmissions of joy and fear, discipline and chaos, comedy and tragedy.

There are glimmers here not only of the band that they were but also suggestions of what they could become.

Her voice also takes up more space on this record, going deeper and flitting over Stack’s melodies with such abandon it’s as if she might float away.

Robots is decidedly lowercase music, more a piece of his puzzle than a picture on its own.